Deeplinks Blog posts about Transparency

This summer, decision-makers at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) garnered considerable criticism -- not to mention the ire of Anonymous and days of protests -- after they chose to shut down cell phone access to four BART stations in downtown San Francisco based on rumors of an upcoming protest. Now BART’s Board Directors has drafted a Cell Phone Interruption Policy, which they will consider at an upcoming meeting on October 27th.

EFF applauds the BART for taking the time to develop a policy whose intent is to clarify the circumstances under which BART may shut down cell phone communications, but the proposed policy, which was made public last week, raises some profound concerns about procedure and accountability that we believe should be directly addressed.

Ten years ago today, in the name of protecting national security and guarding against terrorism, President George W. Bush signed into law some of the most sweeping changes to search and surveillance law in modern American history. Unfortunately known as the USA PATRIOT Act, many of its provisions incorporate decidedly unpatriotic principles barred by the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution. Provisions of the PATRIOT Act have been used to target innocent Americans and are widely used in investigations that have nothing to do with national security.

NextGov.com is reporting that the FBI will begin rolling out its Next Generation Identification (NGI) facial recognition service as early as this January.Once NGI is fully deployed and once each of its approximately 100 million records also includes photographs, it will become trivially easy to find and track Americans.

“When everything is classified, then nothing is classified…The system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.” ~ Justice Stewart, New York Times v. United States, 1971.

Last week, the White House issued the so-called ‘WikiLeaks’ Executive Order, which mandates better security for the nation’s classified computer systems. While ensuring that the government has better security over its own systems is a good goal, it fails to address an equally important problem: the American government’s addiction to overclassification, which goes far beyond the appropriate and effective means necessary to safeguard real secrets.